Friday, March 11, 2011

She was born into a lower middle-class Bavarian family and was educated at the Catholic Young Women's Institute in Simbach-am-Inn. In 1930 she was employed as a saleswoman in the shop of Heinrich Hoffman, Hitler's photographer, and in this way met Hitler. She became his mistress and lived in a house that he provided in Munich; in 1936 she went to live at his chalet Berghof in Berchtesgaden.There is no evidence that the relationship between Hitler and Eva Braun was other than a normal one, except that the pleasures that she provided him were those of domesticity and relaxation rather than eroticism. She was an accomplished swimmer and skier, but her interests were generally frivolous. Hitler never allowed her to be seen in public with him or to accompany him to Berlin, and she had no influence on his political life.In April 1945 she joined Hitler in Berlin, against his orders, determined to stay with him until the end. In recognition of her loyalty he decided to marry her, and the civil ceremony was carried out in the Chancellery bunker on April 29. The next day Eva Hitler ended her life by taking poison; her husband either poisoned or shot himself at her side. Their bodies were burned.Eva Braun was the mistress of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler from 1932 until their deaths in a suicide pact at the end of World War II.She was working as a photographer's assistant when she met Hitler in 1929, the year she turned 17; in the following years they were rarely seen in public together, and few knew of their relationship. She is most famous for her final days in April of 1945, when she joined Hitler in his bunker in Berlin.Though given the chance to flee, she loyally remained with Hitler even as the war was clearly lost. They were married in the bunker on 29 April 1945; the next day they committed suicide together, she by swallowing cyanide and he by shooting himself with a pistol.Other women of World War II: Chinese First Lady Madame Chiang Kai-Shek, American First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl.